In a move that could raise new questions about food safety and result in economic setbacks to California’s multi-billion-dollar agricultural industry, the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Tuesday confirmed that a case of mad cow disease has been found in a dairy cow in the Central Valley.

The cow tested positive at a rendering facility in Hanford, 15 miles west of Visalia in Kings County, operated by Baker Commodities, the company confirmed Tuesday afternoon. Baker has 21 plants across the United States that convert animal by-products into pet food, poultry feed and tallow, used in soaps, paints and cosmetics. The company advertises that it provides “dead stock removal” for dairy cows and cattle.

“Our facility collected it from a local dairy,” said Dennis Luckey, a spokesman for the company. “It was going to be rendered.”

Although many dairy cows in the U.S. are eventually slaughtered for pet food and other products, some are turned into ground beef and other types of meat for human consumption, including for fast-food restaurants and school lunch menus.

Mad cow disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, is a progressive brain disease that is always fatal in cattle.

After a dairy cow in Washington state was diagnosed with mad cow disease in 2003, it devastated the U.S. beef industry. Dozens of countries refused to import U.S. beef, and U.S. beef shipments plunged 82 percent.

Numerous questions remained unanswered Tuesday, including where the cow came from, how it got the disease, whether other animals in the herd might be infected and whether any meat from them has been sold for public consumption.

Seriously if you live in parts of SoCal this is in the works for you. Drink up.

And by the way keep watering your lawns and golf courses.

I will bet you that property values will just soar in these areas that are watered this way when the news gets out. Any takers?

Even better the water customers get to pay 5% more for the improvement that the wastewater will give their hydration experience.

Now lots of these folks down in Orange County and San Diego County are the kind of folks who believe that water flouridation is a commie plot foisted upon us by a complicit government. But since there has been no uprising yet over this issue the same folks seem to be just fine with eating shit as long as it is government processed. Do you see the irony?

By the way I am opposed to flouridation myself, because I don’t like the idea of medicating our water supply on principle. Give us pure water please.

“Using this technology, Orange County Water District produces 70 million gallons of drinking water a day that is injected into the groundwater basin and delivered to thousands of homes and businesses every day.”

Now if you want to know what I really think about this idea is I think it is outrageously stupid. Technology advances, to be sure, and the technology may well be adequate right now to produce potable water from wastewater. But what happens fifteen or twenty years down the line when the water district is squeezed, equipment starts wearing out, maintenance is cut back, corners are cut on decontamination? One bad accident and the aquifer (our common water supply) is contaminated for a long time. This is a more serious issue than a bridge falling down, it could have bad outcomes for millions. This is an extreme measure that may someday be necessary but in an era when we still have golf courses and lawns there is no reason to even consider this. At a cost of $200 million dollars for this one project alone it sure smells like a boondoggle, not like cool, cool, water.

have a peaceful day,

Bill

Prions:

This altered structure is extremely stable and accumulates in infected tissue, causing tissue damage and cell death.[7] This structural stability means that prions are resistant to denaturation by chemical and physical agents, making disposal and containment of these particles difficult.

Current research suggests that the primary method of infection in animals is through ingestion. It is thought that prions may be deposited in the environment through the remains of dead animals and via urine, saliva, and other body fluids. They may then linger in the soil by binding to clay and other minerals.[53]

A University of Californian research team, led by Nobel prize winner Stanley Prusiner, has proven that infection can occur from prions in manure.[citation needed] And since manure is present in many areas surrounding water reservoirs, as well as used on many crop fields, it raises the possibility of widespread transmission.

Infectious particles possessing nucleic acid are dependent upon it to direct their continued replication. Prions, however, are infectious by their effect on normal versions of the protein. Sterilizing prions therefore involves the denaturation of the protein to a state where the molecule is no longer able to induce the abnormal folding of normal proteins. Prions are generally quite resistant to proteases, heat, radiation, and formalin treatments,[54] although their infectivity can be reduced by such treatments. Effective prion decontamination relies upon protein hydrolysis or reduction or destruction of protein tertiary structure. Examples include bleach, caustic soda, and strong acidic detergents such as LpH.[55] 134°C (274°F) for 18 minutes in a pressurized steam autoclave may not be enough to deactivate the agent of disease.[56][57] Ozone sterilization is currently being studied as a potential method for prion denature and deactivation.[58] Renaturation of a completely denatured prion to infectious status has not yet been achieved, however partially denatured prions can be renatured to an infective status under certain artificial conditions.[59]

Prions Are Not Degraded By Conventional Sewage Treatment Processes

East County Residents Speak Out Against Proposed El Monte Valley Water Reclamation Project

“It is the sand mining component of the project that had many residents of the El Monte Valley up in arms. Barnes said that in order to facilitate the transporting of about 12 million tons of sand into and out of the valley, about 500 haul trucks will be on the road each day (250 in and 250 out) over the course of eight years.”

Cow died from mad cow disease in Zakarpattya

The press service of the Emergency Ministry disclosed to UNIAN that it was defined by laboratory researches of the Oblast laboratory of the veterinary medicine. According to the preliminary data, some sick animal could bite the cow.

The cow’s carcass was burnt, decontamination and vaccination about 60 head of other cattle was carried out. 11 people, who contacted with animals, are at examination in hospital.

Farmed Fish May Harbor Mad Cow Prions

Evaluation of the Possible Transmission of BSE and Scrapie to Gilthead Sea Bream (Sparus aurata)

In transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), a group of fatal neurodegenerative disorders affecting many species, the key event in disease pathogenesis is the accumulation of an abnormal conformational isoform (PrPSc) of the host-encoded cellular prion protein (PrPC). While the precise mechanism of the PrPC to PrPSc conversion is not understood, it is clear that host PrPC expression is a prerequisite for effective infectious prion propagation. Although there have been many studies on TSEs in mammalian species, little is known about TSE pathogenesis in fish. Here we show that while gilthead sea bream (Sparus aurata) orally challenged with brain homogenates prepared either from a BSE infected cow or from scrapie infected sheep developed no clinical prion disease, the brains of TSE-fed fish sampled two years after challenge did show signs of neurodegeneration and accumulation of deposits that reacted positively with antibodies raised against sea bream PrP. The control groups, fed with brains from uninfected animals, showed no such signs. Remarkably, the deposits developed much more rapidly and extensively in fish inoculated with BSE-infected material than in the ones challenged with the scrapie-infected brain homogenate, with numerous deposits being proteinase K-resistant. These plaque-like aggregates exhibited congophilia and birefringence in polarized light, consistent with an amyloid-like component. The neurodegeneration and abnormal deposition in the brains of fish challenged with prion, especially BSE, raises concerns about the potential risk to public health. As fish aquaculture is an economically important industry providing high protein nutrition for humans and other mammalian species, the prospect of farmed fish being contaminated with infectious mammalian PrPSc, or of a prion disease developing in farmed fish is alarming and requires further evaluation.

Wisconsin Hospital SNAFU Exposes 53 Patients to Human Mad Cow Disease

At issue is whether the 53 patients were exposed to virulent infectious agents called prions via surgical instruments. That’s possible because the instruments in their brain surgeries were also used to remove a brain tumor from a woman in her 50s who died Tuesday of CJD.

Doctors didn’t suspect she had CJD at the time of her June 11 surgery, so they didn’t use disposable instruments or re-sterilize the instruments according to federal CJD guidelines. After the woman rapidly declined over the next month after her surgery, the hospital sent a brain tissue biopsy taken from the earlier surgery to a national center to test for the illness.